How I Made $708.89 in Affiliate Income Last Month

First, I’ll have to start off with a clarification. I report my affiliate earnings when they are paid out rather than when they are made. Therefore, most of the affiliate income I reported last month was actually earned in November and December. There also fluctuations when I barely miss an affiliate program’s payout threshold for the month and the earnings rollover to the next month.

My affiliate earnings pale in comparison to the $28,000 Pat at Smart Passive Income made last month but I do have several people every month asking how I make money from affiliate programs. That is probably because my earnings seem more attainable or my traffic is more in line with their level of traffic. I’m far from an expert on affiliate marketing but I’ll do my best to share what I do know.

Place Lots of Links

The main thing that helps me make affiliate income is having lots of affiliate links on my sites. If there isn’t a link for people to click then you can’t make any money. You don’t want people who visit your site to be turned off by the site being full of affiliate ads but you can get lots of links on your site without making it look too spammy. I’ve found that links in posts work much better than links in the sidebar. Anytime you write about something that has an affiliate program make sure you include a link. You will see a few links in this post.

An affiliate ad in your header is the next best placement. You can see that I have an ad for Mr. Rebates in my header. When you do place affiliate ads in your sidebar or header it helps to switch up the ads occasionally to reduce ad blindness. Something I do at Bank Bonuses is to place an affiliate ad at the end of a post that is not related to the post. Here is an example of a post with an extra affiliate ad. This wouldn’t work on every blog but it has worked well for me on Bank Bonuses.

Another thing you can do is have a resource page on your blog. The page would include resources that would be helpful to your blog readers and also include some affiliate links for the resources. This is something that I haven’t fully implemented myself but I do plan on adding a resource page.

Use the Right Program for Your Blog

Another thing that can help increase your affiliate earnings is to make sure the affiliate program you’re promoting is a good fit for your blog. Promoting credit cards doesn’t work too well here at Tight Fisted Miser but promoting credit cards does work well at Bank Bonuses. This makes sense because people come to TFM looking for ways to not spend money and a credit card seems detrimental to that goal. On the other hand people go to Bank Bonuses looking to make money which can be done for signing up for a credit card bonus offer. Programs like Swagbucks and Mr. Rebates that are more appealing to frugal types. If you’re not sure what programs are the best fit for your blog try a few different things until you find some that work.

Traffic

In order to make decent affiliate income you need to have a decent level of traffic to your site. If you only have a couple hundred visitors a month to your site then it will obviously be very difficult to make much affiliate income from the site. You don’t need a ton of traffic though if it is the right type of traffic. Bank Bonuses only gets about 3,000 visits a month but it makes decent affiliate income because the visitors are looking for banking and credit card deals and much more likely to open an account than a random visitor. It is beyond the scope of this post but if you want to build up your traffic you can do it with search engine optimization. I don’t do much SEO myself other than using the All-In-One SEO pack but I do get the majority of my traffic from search engines. You can also build up your traffic with social media but it isn’t the best way for increasing affiliate income. In general search engine traffic is a lot better than social media traffic because it is more targeted. There is tons of free information on the web on search engine optimization. With a little research you should be able to find a couple things you can do to increase your search engine traffic.

Conclusion

As I said before I’m far from an expert on earning affiliate income but I hope this post can be of help to at least some of you. I still have a lot to learn and need to do more to implement what I already know to increase my affiliate income. If you have any suggestions please feel free to share them in the comments.